Make zergs less promoting?

I don't know if people agree with me, but me and my friends have these issues with wvwvw.

1. Being in a zerg is the most beneficial in this game, in terms of rewards and for the map in general. The problem with this is that the performance in wvwvw zergs are not good, I don't know if there are any plans to optimize this? It has been an issue since the launch of the game. If all three zergs meet up, the lag is really gamebreaking, it doesn't really matter how you place your spells, how you dodge etc... And that is why professions with best aoes are the best in zergs (together with some support specs). They are good because it is not really an issue where they place the spells and so on. It makes the entire game mode boring in a while, unfortunately.
2. Roaming is fun for smaller battles, but it is neither rewarding nor necessary really. It can be fun, sure, but since it has little to no effect on the map and rewards are much less than being in a zerg, then why?

Do you know if there is any plans to either improve performance in the map, or to reduce importance of zergs? Optimal solution would be if it would be possible to have many smaller groups instead of one large zerg, and that it important and equally rewarding as zerg. It would also be great if wvwvw wins would give some rewards to the server, just something like extra experience or something else, so that it feels like you are really fighting for your server. I noticed that there were wvwvw tournaments, but it seems like it is something that is not happening anymore?

I think that something need to change, especially also since it seems like the population is starting to decrease as well. Friday reset is when people are around, but after that the game mode is not as popular. I don't know what the rest of you think?

Well you have to really really look at the intent of the game mode. Since release someone is always trying to make it something it was not intended to be...

@Loosmaster.8263 said:Well you have to really really look at the intent of the game mode. Since release someone is always trying to make it something it was not intended to be...

I don't know how having more spread out important objectives for example that promotes instead of having one big zerg having several smaller groups of 10 players? And to have server pride matter somehow. And IF zerg is the best option, why not have it optimized after 5 years or for how long it has been out now? And there is also an issue that outside friday reset, the game mode isn't very popular.

Extra rewards for winning skirmishes is a disincentive, counterintuitive though that might seem. People who aren't playing the mode will want to stack more on servers they perceive as winners if the rewards are better for winners. People who are already playing the mode and who are not winning skirmishes through lack of coverage and low numbers are already fighting their kittens off. Giving the people beating on them extra rewards for doing it won't magically make the outnumbered fighters 'want to win more.' They already want to win. It will just punish them for fighting for a cause and give them incentive to try to get into a stacked server, because only a sucker would hang around in a low pop server to get beaten on, AND get less reward.

Teamwork is awesome, but a sense of team needs to be earned through play with each other. If skirmish winning is incentivized, I am not going to say; 'OH! Now thousands of people can rise up together and form new teams and fill empty servers and together we can fight down the T1 servers and claim our share of the rewards!' simply because of one basic princple; you can only control your own behavior.

I can't make other people want to fight. I can't make other people join my server. I can't make other people help me defend towers, form ten five man havoc squads to keep everything flipped, move with me to an empty server to carve out a new kingdom, or whatever my goal is. I can only control my own behavior.

So if skirmish winners get more loot, each individual's best decision is to move someplace where their odds of winning skirmishes are higher.

@pinkglow.3429 said:

@Loosmaster.8263 said:Well you have to really really look at the intent of the game mode. Since release someone is always trying to make it something it was not intended to be...

It's the fact you can play the game mode in any form that you or your server pleases. Forcing an option to do otherwise is counterproductive in "my" opinion, that's all.

zerg is love zerg is life =)

There is probably an issue with server balance and matchmaking then, which is another issue to solve. If three small servers face together, and winning for your server offers server pride somehow like some global server reward like extra experience. Some changes could also be done to avoid having same servers always win, and it is probably about objectives or other stuff, things can be done. A wvwvw tournament that is split up so that a winner among small servers is rewarded too would be great, I don't know how the wvwvw tournaments were done before?

@diamondgirl.6315 said:Extra rewards for winning skirmishes is a disincentive, counterintuitive though that might seem. People who aren't playing the mode will want to stack more on servers they perceive as winners if the rewards are better for winners. People who are already playing the mode and who are not winning skirmishes through lack of coverage and low numbers are already fighting their kittens off. Giving the people beating on them extra rewards for doing it won't magically make the outnumbered fighters 'want to win more.' They already want to win. It will just punish them for fighting for a cause and give them incentive to try to get into a stacked server, because only a sucker would hang around in a low pop server to get beaten on, AND get less reward.

Teamwork is awesome, but a sense of team needs to be earned through play with each other. If skirmish winning is incentivized, I am not going to say; 'OH! Now thousands of people can rise up together and form new teams and fill empty servers and together we can fight down the T1 servers and claim our share of the rewards!' simply because of one basic princple; you can only control your own behavior.

I can't make other people want to fight. I can't make other people join my server. I can't make other people help me defend towers, form ten five man havoc squads to keep everything flipped, move with me to an empty server to carve out a new kingdom, or whatever my goal is. I can only control my own behavior.

So if skirmish winners get more loot, each individual's best decision is to move someplace where their odds of winning skirmishes are higher.

Server linkings have not been adjusted since the release of PoF, plus with people playing the PoF content to take a break from the k-trains, populations will be in a state of flux for a while. Next linkings should be on the 27th.

@pinkglow.3429 said:There is probably an issue with server balance and matchmaking then, which is another issue to solve. If three small servers face together, and winning for your server offers server pride somehow like some global server reward like extra experience. Some changes could also be done to avoid having same servers always win, and it is probably about objectives or other stuff, things can be done. A wvwvw tournament that is split up so that a winner among small servers is rewarded too would be great, I don't know how the wvwvw tournaments were done before?

Probably, and I honestly haven't the faintest idea how to make that work better. I just know that adding rewards for winning skirmishes won't play out in the 'perfect world' scenario. Not having the same servers always win sounds like a great goal, but if in order to implement that, you have to hobble teams who have worked hard to get where they are, that feels a little disingenuous. Why should people be punished for excelling?

Someone in another thread suggested the wvw reward tracks contain more relevant and worthwhile wvw-based rewards. I would absolutely support that change. I think things like leveling tomes in the reward tracks could be replaced by superior siege, tactics, badges of honor, proofs of heroics, ascended materials like wood, silk, leather, etc.; things we need and can use and would put right back into wvw. It would make the reward tracks more exciting, reduce the costs levied upon guild commanders, and would not involve tampering with match ups or the pip system.

It would be more fun but the majority of people are just playing for points...Kill zergs and you risk killing WvW.

@michaeltm.6247 said:It would be more fun but the majority of people are just playing for points...Kill zergs and you risk killing WvW.

I dunno. It may kill off wvw in the short term as people ragequit, but it would also bring in a new different type of player. After some time the ragequitters will start trickling back in if they really even quit at all.

It's all speculation though. We will probably never actually know because it would be too big of a risk for Anet to change WvW that much.

If only they had test servers like most other big mmos.

I think of wvw like pve, except with ever changing encounters.

Lolwhat? Most players fight on the same lvl of AI as npcs lol.

I really love play in an organized zerg. i also do Roaming when everyone tag down but i really don't like it, because Im not speaking with a teammates and 1 man cant take towers only camps. This is a personal opinion where in my case I prefer to play with an organized zerg than to play alone. And i really don't have many problems with the lag when 3 zerg are fighting maybe this is a internet problem.

@Oshi.9324 said:I really love play in an organized zerg. i also do Roaming when everyone tag down but i really don't like it, because Im not speaking with a teammates and 1 man cant take towers only camps. This is a personal opinion where in my case I prefer to play with an organized zerg than to play alone. And i really don't have many problems with the lag when 3 zerg are fighting maybe this is a internet problem.

Towers can be soloed. Keeps can too, but the likelihood of doing it before enough defenders try to stop you is rare.

Things like the 5 person aoe cap, small maps with lots of waypoints, downstate, combat speed...

All horses so thoroughly beaten their bones are but dust. Welcome to GW2, this is what you're getting.

What performance issues? There might be some minimal skill lag when the server is having a bad day, then again, unless you're spamming keys it's not such a big deal as this is often largely covered by the casting time animations. Look, I play WvW every day for about 2h, and I've had one case of some moderately annoying skill lag once last month and it lasted for about half an hour. I don't know what you're doing, but you may want to look for a better ISP if you're having so many lag issues.

@Rennie.6750 said:What performance issues? There might be some minimal skill lag when the server is having a bad day, then again, unless you're spamming keys it's not such a big deal as this is often largely covered by the casting time animations. Look, I play WvW every day for about 2h, and I've had one case of some moderately annoying skill lag once last month and it lasted for about half an hour. I don't know what you're doing, but you may want to look for a better ISP if you're having so many lag issues.

Just because you aren't having issues doesn't mean that no one is. Quite ignorant of you to think that.

Its not necessarily game design thats the issue. Its human history and natural tendencies, coupled with the nature of conflict. There arn't any examples of one or 5 people defeating entires armies in history (outside of childrens stories).

Even extreme examples like Thermopylae involved hundreds of spartans. Moder SOF operate in teams of a dozen or more....

Small group fighting in WvW could certainly use further incentivatuon. But I don't see "strength in numbers" going anywhere

@momophily.3814 said:Its not necessarily game design thats the issue. Its human history and natural tendencies, coupled with the nature of conflict. There arn't any examples of one or 5 people defeating entires armies in history (outside of childrens stories).

Even extreme examples like Thermopylae involved hundreds of spartans. Moder SOF operate in teams of a dozen or more....

Small group fighting in WvW could certainly use further incentivatuon. But I don't see "strength in numbers" going anywhere

The biggest problem in splitting up the zergs into independent smaller groups is that for every split you will need a commander.Are there really enough commanders out there?

Plus because lots of objectives can be taken solo there really isn't anything in the game that's forcing players to group up in 5 or 10 man squads.

Playing through the new expansion I noticed something. When HOT was released everything was group focused (during this time we also got server linkings btw), but POF with the mounts and fiery death and high liklihood of dismount due to fiery death is LESS group focused and most players are quite selfish.

It's just an observation, but maybe this means there's hope for wvw in a few years being less group focused as players slowly start to remember you don't need 50 people to take down a sentry.

Right now there's enough gankers playing WvW (PoF and the good old Sb / Deadeye).World versus World is.... you know... about large scale fights, no ?You can roam, it's not a big deal, some classes can do that pretty well. But some individualities shouldn't be able to change the face of the result at the end of the week.

On the other hand, I understand you, lags are terrible, and if every servers meet in SMC, you can just roll your face on your keyboard, pray to survive and to kill the enemies.

They said on reddit they want to balance the conditions in WvW, maybe that will help ?I heard some lags come from too much condi + boon, soooo... we will see ?

Until then, just avoid fighting in SMC. It's fine out there (most of the time)

@Saraneth.6021 said:

@Rennie.6750 said:What performance issues? There might be some minimal skill lag when the server is having a bad day, then again, unless you're spamming keys it's not such a big deal as this is often largely covered by the casting time animations. Look, I play WvW every day for about 2h, and I've had one case of some moderately annoying skill lag once last month and it lasted for about half an hour. I don't know what you're doing, but you may want to look for a better ISP if you're having so many lag issues.

It's not ignorance, it's simple logic. Everybody has a fair share of server power and bandwidth. If someone on your server isn't lagging but you are, it's 100% not the server, even if it's just one player out of 50 not having any issue. If it's not the server then ANet can't do anything about it, but you can.

I'm still trying to decipher the post and most of the replies.

@pinkglow.3429 said:

1. Being in a zerg is the most beneficial in this game, in terms of rewards and for the map in general. The problem with this is that the performance in wvwvw zergs are not good, I don't know if there are any plans to optimize this? It has been an issue since the launch of the game. If all three zergs meet up, the lag is really gamebreaking, it doesn't really matter how you place your spells, how you dodge etc... And that is why professions with best aoes are the best in zergs (together with some support specs). They are good because it is not really an issue where they place the spells and so on. It makes the entire game mode boring in a while, unfortunately.

Performance issues still exist because optimization is not a process where you endlessly invest time, effort, and money for ever increasing gains. Only so much can be done, any resources allocated to optimization come at the expense of some other improvement, and even when you secure those resources there are diminishing returns and tradeoffs to be made. Rendering character models is one of the most computationally intensive aspects of any MMO, and when you get a large number of characters in one place you're going to experience slowdowns. The fact that all MMOs with modern graphics (and even slightly less modern, like WoW) have this issue should say something about the difficulty in solving it. If you were around at the beginning, you remember Anet's original solution: aggressive culling of character models. Performance was good, right until your health went 100-0 out of nowhere and then the enemy zerg started loading in around your corpse. Anet rightfully decided that being able to see your opponents was worth the performance hit and here we are.

You can go into your graphics options and lower the shadow, character model limit, and character model quality settings. If/when you upgrade your rig, don't skimp on the CPU. That's all you can really do. The game is five years old, Anet's already found the low hanging fruit as far as optimization goes and any further changes will be small, incremental ones that you likely won't even notice.

@Rennie.6750 said:What performance issues? There might be some minimal skill lag when the server is having a bad day, then again, unless you're spamming keys it's not such a big deal as this is often largely covered by the casting time animations. Look, I play WvW every day for about 2h, and I've had one case of some moderately annoying skill lag once last month and it lasted for about half an hour. I don't know what you're doing, but you may want to look for a better ISP if you're having so many lag issues.

Just because you are having issues doesn't mean that no one is. Quite ignorant of you to think that.> @Rennie.6750 said:

@Saraneth.6021 said:

@Rennie.6750 said:What performance issues? There might be some minimal skill lag when the server is having a bad day, then again, unless you're spamming keys it's not such a big deal as this is often largely covered by the casting time animations. Look, I play WvW every day for about 2h, and I've had one case of some moderately annoying skill lag once last month and it lasted for about half an hour. I don't know what you're doing, but you may want to look for a better ISP if you're having so many lag issues.

Would you go up to someone dying of cancer and say "I don't have cancer, so you shouldn't either!"? Ignorant.